Daily Archives: February 15, 2016

It’s Gettin’ Hot in Herre

Posted on February 15, 2016 by impossibleensign

Pharrell was probably thinking of bodies when he helped penned this hit for Nelly. Despite what the title may suggest I don’t think he had thermal radiation in mind… Continue reading →

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Stonehenge

Posted on February 15, 2016 by lawlorsolarsystem

The layout of Stonehenge has confounded historians and archaeologists for years, and they still do not entirely know why it is there. But historians have theorized that at least part of the layout has to do with astronomy. One of the stones, called the Heel Stone, is lined up exactly with the Sun on the […] Continue reading →

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Celestial NASCAR: Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion

Posted on February 15, 2016 by d51blog

Before 1609, the scientific consensus in Europe was that the planets orbited the Earth in perfect circles; even dissenting views such as Copernican heliocentricism relied upon perfect circles to guide objects around the Sun. Johannes Kepler, however, motivated by minute errors in planetary distances discovered when attempting to construct Copernicus’ model, revolutionized astronomy with his laws of […] Continue reading →

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The Gravity Slingshot

Posted on February 15, 2016 by martisnv

Recently we discussed a maneuver called the gravity assist. NASA uses this technique frequently, most notably with the Voyager probe during flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. In simplest terms, a gravity assist changes a spacecraft’s velocity by going through a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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